A word from Jeff Jacoby

Before NPR’s disgraceful treatment of Juan Williams, there was NPR’s disgraceful treatment of Steven Emerson, one of the world’s foremost experts on the threat from Islamist terrorism. In 1998 I learned that NPR — in response to pressure from Islamist extremists — had blackballed Emerson from appearing on its airwaves.
When I broke the story in the Boston Globe, NPR denied that it ever blackballed anyone. Yet Emerson was still being kept off the air three years later — i.e., after 9/11, when everyone could see just how prescient his warnings had been.
In the current uproar over Juan Williams’s firing, I thought it might be good to recall that when it comes to ultra-PC genuflecting to Islamist sensibilities, NPR is a repeat offender.